Political parties in Ukraine

Ukraine has a multi-party system with numerous political parties, in which no one party often has a chance of gaining power alone, and parties must work with each other to form coalition governments. In the (October 2014) Ukrainian parliamentary election 52 political parties nominated candidates.[1] In the nationwide (October 2015) local elections this number had grown to 132 political parties.[2]

Many parties in Ukraine have very small memberships and are unknown to the general public.[3] Party membership in Ukraine is lower than 1% of the population eligible to vote (compared to an average 4.7% in the European Union[4]).[5][6] National parties currently not represented in Ukraine’s national parliament Verkhovna Rada do have representatives in municipal counsels.[7][8][9][10] Small parties used to join in multi-party coalitions (electoral blocks) for the purpose of participating in parliamentary elections; but on November 17, 2011 the Ukrainian Parliament approved an election law that banned the participation of blocs of political parties in parliamentary elections.[11] Ukrainian society's trust of political parties is very low overall.[3][12] According to an April 2014 poll by Razumkov Centre 14.7%.[13] According to a February 2020 poll by again Razumkov Centre, more than 70% of surveyed rather or completely did not trust political parties.[3]

The Ukrainian oligarchs play a key role in sponsoring of political parties and participation in every day politics.[14]

Parties can only register with the Ministry of Justice if they can "demonstrate a base of support in two-thirds of Ukraine's Oblasts" (Ukraine's 24 primary administrative units) and in two-thirds of the raions of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea.[15][16] This means that 10,000 signatures needs to be collected in these areas.[16] Including in Crimea, although Ukraine lost control of this territory in 2014 (to Russia).[16] (The only way to fulfill this norm is to get signatures of Ukrainian citizens living elsewhere in Ukraine with Crimean residence.[16]) Then within six months the party must establish regional offices in a majority of the 24 oblasts.[17] In practice these offices rarely stay active and open in-between elections.[17] Because of the procedural difficulties of registering a party the practice of renaming existing political forces is widespread.[16] (For instance, from January to September 2020 50 parties changed their name.[16]) In practice this means that long career politicians in Ukraine regularly switch to a new party.[16]

10 years in a row not nominating candidates for national parliamentary and presidential elections is a legal ground for liquidating a party.[3][nb 1]

Ukraine’s election law forbids outside financing of political parties or campaigns.[18]

All data on any legal political parties as any other public organizations in Ukraine is kept at the Single Registry (Ukrainian: Єдиний реєстр громадських формувань, Yedynyi reyestr hromadskykh formuvan), with online version of which provided by the Ministry of Justice.[19] On 1 January 2020 349 political parties were in this register.[3]

There have developed two major movements[nb 2][nb 3] in the Ukrainian parliament since its independence:[22][23][24]

• A pro-Western and pro-European general liberal national democrats[25][20] who from time to time featured individual politicians with a nationalist past (for example Andriy Shkil, Andriy Parubiy and Levko Lukyanenko) with the Our Ukraine Blocs and Bloc Yulia Tymoshenko (now Fatherland[26]) as its frontrunners;[27] UDAR replaced the Our Ukraine Bloc in the 2012 Ukrainian parliamentary election.[28][29] In the 2014 parliamentary election UDAR did not participate but its members filled 30% of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc election list.[30] The Petro Poroshenko Bloc won the election with 132 seats.[31]
• A pro-Russian, latently Eurosceptic, often anti-American and partly anti-liberal group of parties, which in the 1990s was dominated by the Communist Party of Ukraine, and was dominated by the Party of Regions from the late 2000s till the party disintegrated shortly after the 2014 Ukrainian revolution.[23][27][32]

The first movement (mentioned above) gets its voters mainly from Western Ukraine and Central Ukraine; the latter from Eastern Ukraine and Southern Ukraine.[33] The radical nationalistic[34] All-Ukrainian Union "Svoboda" (7 seats in the Ukrainian parliament[31]) can not be placed in the above-mentioned two major movements.[23] "Svoboda" gets the lion share of its votes from Western Ukraine.[35]

The political party Revival managed to reach the Verkhovna Rada on several occasions without winning elections. The party parliamentary faction was forming based on unaffiliated politicians.

Ukrainian parties tend not to have a clear ideology but to contain different political groups with diverging ideological outlooks.[37] Unlike in Western politics, civilizational and geostrategic orientations play a more important role than economic and socio-political agendas for parties.[23] This has led to coalition governments that would be unusual from a Western point of view; for example: the Azarov Government which included the Party of Regions with the financial backing of some Ukrainian oligarchs and the Communist Party of Ukraine and the social-democratic Batkivshchyna and the economically liberal European Party of Ukraine in the Second Tymoshenko Government.[23]

Professor Paul D'Anieri has argued (in 2006) that Ukrainian parties are "elite-based rather than mass-based".[38] While former Ambassador of Germany to Ukraine (2000–2006) Dietmar Stüdemann from Embassy of Germany, Kyiv believes that personalities are more important in Ukrainian politics than (ideological) platforms. "Parties in the proper meaning of this word do not exist in Ukraine so far. A party for Germans is its platform first, and its personalities later."[39]

• Politics of Ukraine
• Liberalism in Ukraine

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Political parties in Ukraine.

• Ukraine's party system: specifics of establishment, problems of functioning, trends of evolution, 2010 analysis by Razumkov Centre